A Vast Conspiracy (75 page)

All fifty-five Republicans (and one Democrat, Russ Feingold) voted against Byrd’s motion to dismiss, which meant that the trial would continue—albeit with no chance for the managers to obtain the sixty-seven votes they needed to remove Clinton from office. The tortured negotiations between Lott and Hyde allowed the managers a shred of dignity on the witness issue. They could take videotaped depositions of three witnesses, and then argue to the Senate that further, live testimony was necessary. So the managers had to decide which three witnesses to call.

Given their central roles, Lewinsky and Vernon Jordan were automatic choices. By this reasoning, the third selection should have been obvious as well: Betty Currie. Indeed, there was an actual unresolved issue relating to the evidence that Currie could address. Because Bob Bittman had so botched Currie’s examination in the grand jury, back in the previous January, the record was unclear on an important point. Had Clinton asked Currie leading questions about her recollections a second time? Did the president really try to persuade her to testify falsely either in the grand jury or in the Paula Jones case? And what of the transfer of gifts from Lewinsky to Currie? Who initiated that transaction?

The way the managers addressed the Currie issue underlined just how preposterous the Senate trial had become. Weighing the question back in the committee’s offices, Hyde said he didn’t want to confront a sympathetic African-American woman. He didn’t want to compound the political damage the Republican Party had already suffered. (Indeed, for the same reason, Hyde didn’t want to call Jordan either, but his managers talked him out of that view.) The issue of Currie’s testimony thus provided a kind of laboratory demonstration of the way politics trumped truth-seeking in the trial.

Besides, Lindsey Graham gave Hyde a convenient excuse to avoid calling Currie. Graham had become obsessed by the role of Sidney Blumenthal in the case. With his fervent partisanship and refusal to give interviews, Blumenthal became a figure of some mystery, which only whetted the right’s curiosity about him. Graham wanted to explore what he thought was a sinister plot by Blumenthal to discredit Lewinsky at the beginning of the investigation. The charge had nothing to do with the case against Clinton, but Hyde still decided to make the former journalist the managers’ third witness.

For the most part, the examinations only demonstrated the ineptitude of the managers. Lewinsky’s lawyers advised her, above all, to remain consistent with her prior testimony. This wasn’t difficult, because she knew the facts far better than Ed Bryant, the Tennessee congressman assigned to conduct the interrogation. In the videotaped session, held in a suite at the Mayflower Hotel on February 1, Lewinsky confidently breezed through her version of the events, and Bryant lacked both the knowledge and the intensity to challenge her. (McCollum, who was also present, nearly bolted out of his chair in irritation at Bryant’s meandering style.) By the end of the interview, Lewinsky was treating the congressman like a silly schoolboy.

“Do you still have feelings for the president?” Bryant asked.

“I have mixed feelings,” Lewinsky replied coolly.

“What, uh—maybe you could tell us a little bit more about what those mixed feelings are.”

No, thanks, said the witness. “I think what you need to know is that my grand jury testimony is truthful irrespective of whatever those mixed feelings are in my testimony today,” she said.

A day later, Vernon Jordan faced a more prepared questioner, Asa Hutchinson. On the evidence, Hutchinson obtained some concessions from Jordan—that he knew the president, not Betty Currie, was behind the request for the job search, and that Clinton had withheld from him the fact that Lewinsky’s name had appeared on the witness list in the Jones case. Neither disclosure transformed the case, but both added to the air of unseemliness around the president’s behavior.

More striking than what Jordan said was how he said it. Unlike his friend the president, Jordan had enjoyed the embrace of the Washington
establishment (and press corps) throughout the Lewinsky story. Clearly, the lawyer believed the wonderful things that had been written about him, and so he spoke with breathtaking arrogance. The nadir came in an answer to David Kendall, who fed Jordan a softball about “the job assistance you have over your career given to people.”

Jordan replied with a speech about the civil rights movement. When he graduated from law school in 1960, he said, “it was very clear to me that no law firm in Atlanta would hire me. It was very clear to me that I could not get a job as a black lawyer in the city government, the county government, the state government, or the federal government.” So, he said, his high school bandmaster got him a job with a fraternity brother as a civil rights lawyer.

“I have never forgotten Kenneth Days’s generosity,” Jordan intoned. “That’s always been etched in my heart and my mind, and as a result, because I stand on Mr. Days’s shoulders and Don Hollowell’s shoulders, I felt some responsibility to the extent that I could be helpful or get in a position to be helpful, that I would do that.…”

By Jordan’s astonishing reasoning, then, it was the civil rights movement that taught him to assist the likes of Monica Lewinsky. In truth, the best that can be said of Jordan’s role was that he behaved with a stunning lack of curiosity about why his friend the president was so interested in helping this particular twenty-four-year-old woman. Instead of displaying his heretofore legendary savvy, Jordan spoke couth to power and did Clinton’s bidding. A more fitting lesson about Jordan’s conduct was that black plutocrats behave a lot like their white counterparts.

On February 3, Senator Arlen Specter, a Pennsylvania Republican, presided over the deposition of Sidney Blumenthal, and the senator promptly established that he hadn’t even bothered to learn the House managers’ names. Specter’s repeated references to Lindsey Graham, who was conducting the questioning, as “Congressman Lindsey” weren’t the only things that caused muffled laughter in this absurd examination.

Graham went into the deposition trying to prove that Blumenthal had orchestrated a vindictive and false press campaign to portray Lewinsky as a stalker. Blumenthal denied spreading any stories about Lewinsky, but on its face, Graham’s allegation made no sense. The notion of Lewinsky as a stalker had been present in the case from the beginning, and Blumenthal
had nothing to do with it. Isikoff’s original story, which was posted on the web the day the story broke, mentioned stalking. Not surprisingly, the stalker issue surfaced in much of the early press coverage. More important, Lewinsky
was
a stalker. The young woman used Currie and the Navy stewards to monitor Clinton’s schedule, and she even shadowed him around Washington, sometimes staking out his route to and from church. Her own aunt, Debra Finerman, told the FBI that “Lewinsky was known by some as the ‘stalker.’ ” (After Blumenthal’s testimony was released, the writer Christopher Hitchens and two other friends of Blumenthal’s came forward to say that the White House aide had, in private conversations, called Lewinsky a stalker. These comments bore on Blumenthal’s credibility, but could not assist Graham’s futile campaign to prove a White House conspiracy against Lewinsky.)

Graham’s lack of preparation irritated the pompous Specter. In response to the senator’s chidings, Graham promised, at one point, “We’ll try to be laserlike in these questions.” An hour later, Specter twitted him, “We’re still looking for that laser.”

On Saturday, February 6, the managers had a day to play the videotapes and explain their significance, but the senators—bored and restless after a full month of trial—paid little attention. By this time, the managers all shared Hyde’s incessant pout, and during the last break of the day their frustrations boiled over. Rick Santorum, Lott’s unwanted emissary, made a trip to the managers’ war room, off the Senate floor, and sought to buck up the troops.

“You’re doing great,” he said to the managers. “You’re really having an impact on us.”

Rogan called out in response, “So make a motion to let us call more witnesses.”

“Oh, no,” Santorum said, reverting to Senate form. “I can’t do that.”

“Then get the fuck out of here!” one manager called out, and a rain of obscenities fell down on the senator.

“I was just trying to help you guys!” Santorum said, and then he skittered away.

The exhausted lawyers droned through their closing statements, with the Republicans’ Mr. Malaprop, George Gekas, thundering to the senators about “the bald-faced naked phrase of sexual relations.” Even Ruff lost his touch at this point, making the mistake of playing an excerpt from Clinton’s
grand jury testimony on the Senate’s television monitors. The mere sight of the president injected a jolt of adrenaline into the Republicans in the chamber. Senators Phil Gramm and Bob Smith had been sitting drowsily through Ruff’s remarks, but when they saw Clinton on the screen, they sat up and began rolling their eyes and rubbing their faces in irritation. Such was Clinton’s effect on his adversaries.

Hyde had the chance to speak one more time, and he resumed his posture of self-pity. “We are blessedly coming to the end of this melancholy procedure,” he began. “But before we gather up our papers and return to the obscurity from whence we came”—laughter—“permit, please, a few final remarks.”

There was little new—fewer battles (just Agincourt), and more references to the rule of law. Hyde despaired that he had failed to persuade the Senate—and the country—of the magnitude of Clinton’s misdeeds. “Once in a while I do worry about the future,” he said, almost as an aside. “I wonder if, after this culture war is over, this one we are engaged in, an America will survive that is worth fighting for to defend.” In this final utterance, Hyde had abandoned any pretext about the nature of this fight. A scaffolding of law had been built around the conflict in this case, but the core was indeed cultural and political. It had been almost five years since Randall Terry’s bus (
SHOULD CLINTON BE IMPEACHED?
) pulled into the parking lot of the Rose Law Firm in Little Rock. The battles of those years had been fought with the tools of the legal trade, but the argument had really been about what kind of country this was going to be. Bill Clinton might not have won that argument, but Henry Hyde had certainly lost it.

The temperature in Washington reached an improbable seventy-four degrees on February 12, 1999, and the balmy air invested the proceedings with an even greater sense of relief and liberation. The Senate had spent the last two days in closed-door debate about the articles of impeachment, so there was little suspense about the final result. Still, at four minutes past noon, when the chief justice announced that voting would begin, the magnitude of the moment settled heavily in the Senate chamber. No living American had ever seen the Senate vote on whether to remove the president of the United States from office. For the only time in the trial, Rehnquist had a nervous catch in his voice as he read the script before him.

“The Chair reminds the Senate that each senator, when his or her name is called, will stand in his or her place and vote ‘guilty’ or ‘not guilty’ as required by Rule XXIII of the Senate rules on impeachment,” he said. “The Chair also refers to Article I, Section 3, Clause 6, of the Constitution regarding the vote required for conviction on impeachment. Quote: ‘[N]o Person shall be convicted without the Concurrence of two-thirds of the Members present.’